Remembrance Day

Quite by accident I found myself in the middle of Chelmsford today just before 11:00 am. Everyone in the pedestrian precinct had stopped to listen to the Last Post being played on a single trumpet, before a loud report from the park announced the start of the two minute silence.

It was strange, gratifying and very moving to see several hundred people, mostly there doing their daily shopping, standing in perfect silence.

Some people are opposed to Remembrance Day, saying that it glorifies war. I prefer to think of it as a permanent memorial to the ordinary men, the slaughtered Tommies on the Western Front, barely trained, sent over the top into murderous machine-gun fire or blown to pieces by artillery shells, gassed or drowned in the mud of Flanders. So many young men, many having volunteered and lied about their age, but keen to serve their king and country, and cruelly mocked by, in Wilfred Owen’s words: “The old lie, Dulce et Decorum est, Pro patria mori…”